Magazine

How Ellevest is By Women, For Women

By Sallie Krawcheck

We hope you know why Ellevest is for women: because we want to help close the gender investing gap — and we want to help you close your own investing gap, and achieve your biggest financial goals.

That’s the “Why.” What about the “How?”

It’s not just that our lead designer worked her fingers down to stubs to make our site beautiful. (My challenge to her when I hired her: what would the site look like if Tory Burch and Merrill Lynch had a website baby? Answer: Ellevest.)

Sadly, that means we assume you earn less than men (and thus, have less to invest) and that your salary peaks sooner. Bummer — but important to get right, or we could overestimate how much money you’ll have for your goals. That would be an even bigger bummer.

You don’t invest simply to make more money — and you certainly don’t view it as a sport.

2) We assume you live longer than men do.

This means you need more money for goals like retirement. Also important to get right.

3) We recognize that you’re more “risk aware” than the guys are.

So we’ve built in a number of features to recognize this. We also alert you with specific actions you can take as soon as you fall off track for achieving your goals, with guidance for getting back on course.

4) You told us you don’t think of investing simply as a means to make more money — and you certainly don’t view it as a sport*.

You don’t care much about “outperforming the market.” Investing is a means to reach your goals in life, so we built a product in which you choose your goals, like starting a business, having kids, buying a home. Then we calculate the costs of those goals and build your investment portfolios to get you there. It’s really different than most of what else is out there —it’s tailored to what women have told us they want.

5) You told us that you think of your financial goals in life holistically.

In other words, you don’t just want to save for the house…and then save for the business…and then save for retirement. You want to see trade-offs among different goals in your financial plan. So we built an experience that enables you to see and experiment with the trade-offs, such as putting more money towards one goal, postponing another goal or reducing a third goal. No one else does this, and we have a patent pending for it — just saying.

6) You want to know what other women are doing.

We update you on client trends, in case you’re interested in how others are using Ellevest. For instance: The most popular goal among our earliest clients is “A Home of (Their) Own,” with Emergency Funds coming in second. Ellevest clients vary in age — from their early twenties to sixties — and more than 70% of them have set up recurring deposits, either monthly or quarterly. We’ll have more trends to share from this dedicated group of goal-chasers. We hope you’ll be one of them.

All investing entails risk including the possible loss of principal and there is no assurance that the investment will provide positive performance over any period of time.

Money is power.Invest like a woman.

We create personalized investment portfolios based on your finances and a gender-specific salary curve. Get started: Open an account today.